How To Send 1 Million Emails For $100/Month

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Neil, do you want to know how to send 1 million emails for$100 a month?

0:29Neil Patel:Yes.

0:30Eric Siu:Send one million emails or have a million contacts, just to be clear on this? Send one million emails per month. So obviously when you're paying a lot of these different services, it gets pretty expensive when you're sending a million, but I'm going to show you how you can send a million emails per month for a hundred dollars or less. Ready? Yes. I'm ready. I'm actually paying attention to this one. All right. Wow. Missy doesn't pay attention. No, no, no.

0:54Neil Patel:But when I say I'm paying attention, I always pay attention to Eric. It's more so So I'm getting close to my screen because I want to actually see how I can save. But there's a discount Neil's in. Yeah.

1:05Eric Siu:So here's how you can send 1 million emails a month for$100. So if you're sending a million emails per month using Postmark, that's$1 ,206 per month. $1 ,206. If you use Resend at$650 a month, use SendGrid at$600 a month, use Cloud for$354 a month. if you use Amazon SES, I don't know what SES means, but it's$100 a month. So SES and Cloudflare are now the cheapest email providers, right? So he's basically saying, hey, look, so Amazon has this Cloudflare just launches for$354 a month or so, but it's getting cheaper to send emails, which makes a lot of sense because AI does make things deflationary.

1:47Neil Patel:So my viewpoint is I rather spend, I don't know how much I spend on email, but call it over a hundred thousand a year. I substantially more than that. I'd rather spend five, six X this than to take the hundred dollar option. You want to know why? Stability, reliability? No, I bet you Amazon is very stable. The problem with email is all about deliverability. It's actually very hard to get your email into someone's inbox. So what I do is I look for email providers that have shared IP addresses and they let me pick which neighborhood I'm going to be on. So think about who the other parties are that are sending emails.

2:29Neil Patel:Would you agree as marketers, we're probably more aggressive than most businesses, even though we just had a discussion how we don't pitch hard? Yeah. Okay. I agree with you on that too. So what I do is I look for shared IP with people who don't send hard emails at all and they try to just send educational and they barely pitch anything because then when i pitch and i'm harder my deliverability is still great because other people on my block or my ip address are much cleaner than i am i pay extra for that by the way

3:07Eric Siu:like i look for that in any email provider that i use i think that's a great that's a great tactic to use. I would also say this, Neil. I mean, look, levels here is when you think about Cloudflare, they should be in Amazon, they should be pretty good deliverability. He's like, look, it's all the same, but obviously you have to do your own research here. And then you have other people like Nick Gray, Cloudflare deliverability should be very good in S tier. So, oh, look, Syed, our friend Syed here came in. I think Syed launched something over here. Oh, we should talk about this. So for transactional email, if you guys are interested in trying out SendLayer, I can probably give you a better hookup rate for bulk email.

3:43Eric Siu:And we are not a reseller of either of those. Oh, that's interesting, right? So I don't even know what SendLayer is. I know, yeah, look at this. Reliable email deliverability made easy. I bet you he's an investor. Is he an investor in it through his ventures? It's probably in his portfolio. It's probably in his portfolio. But I think it's, look, that is a big thing. And I do think it's worth, like if you're listening to this right now and you're starting out, it's probably worth checking out Cloudflare and Amazon. And then Neil, maybe you can test it on one of your smaller things, but it's interesting to me.

4:17Eric Siu:Look, we're paying six grand a month for eight million emails on Mailgun. And this guy's like, bro. So anyway, I think before you make the change, yes, look into deliverability. It's not always about price. You want to make sure. In my mind, sure, stable, secure, reliable. But in this case, Neil's right, deliverability too.

4:34Neil Patel:Yeah, okay, so check this out. On Eric's screen, you can see how this x post got 2.2 million views i believe it's 2.2 is kind of small for me to read is that correct yeah it's 2.2 so we all talk about posting on social media whether it's x or whether it's linkedin you don't need the follower account to do well you can just do what syed did what syed did is and i don't know what his follower account is but it's probably decent but what he did is he went on a thread that was really popular and blowing up and left a comment about another product when he left that comment how many views does it have or does it show eric yeah it does

5:10Eric Siu:show so just so everyone knows syed has 106 000 followers on um on x and then so he posted and 1800 people saw that that's a lot and that's 1800 potential customers so you should go and see what threads are really popular in your space and just go and respond and i don't know why too many people

5:30Neil Patel:don't do that it's an easy way to generate more revenue through social and everyone's like oh i I don't have the followers. It's not going to work. You don't need any followers. You just need to ride the coattails of other popular threads and leave a response that's helpful. If you notice here, Syed's response, he talked about a product. He talked about how it's a better deal, if I'm not mistaken, than the others. And it's reliable. And it wasn't too aggressive, but it was very relevant. if someone was talking about using AI and how AI is changing the world and then he's just like, oh, you should check out this email solution.

6:08Neil Patel:That's too aggressive, right? And that's not related. Syed's not doing that. But the example that Eric shared is a prime example of what people should be doing with social media to describe more sales if you don't have followers.

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6:49Eric Siu:One user reported saving 90 hours per month, and that was a part-time employee. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com, scale your content without scaling your team. Back to the show. So Neil, you know what that's called? Responding to participating in the community? No, it's called reply guy. So a reply guy is someone that just sits on like X or LinkedIn, for example, just replies to relevant posts. So being a reply guy in the beginning, when you have no followers to Neil's point will get you a lot of views. And like, sometimes I would reply to someone and like, someone's like, oh, this is how I'm using AI.

7:24Eric Siu:And I think this was a couple months ago when my x account wasn't really doing much um i responded and in my my whenever i replied to someone i would get like 40 000 50 000 70 000 views or so but whenever i posted something from scratch and like this is months ago i would barely crack like 500 views or so now it's a different story because i think the algorithm is moving in my my favor and now when i post it's but like i had to be that reply guy initially and then i had to be a lot more consistent and then you start to get the reach and the other thing i'll say too is you don't necessarily need a lot of followers for a lot of views today because the way x works or the way like a tiktok or instagram reels or facebook reels they just they they call it it's not just social media anymore right we we call it uh it's more based on the the interest graph right and so if you post something really good it's going to get a lot of views and um it just followers don't matter nearly as much as they did before um i think even when you look at like a youtube like a short for example youtube long form i think followers still matter a little bit um but not as much as before right neil followers matter very little uh so social media has become democratized

8:28Neil Patel:it doesn't matter if you have a million followers or a hundred you guys have all seen the girl that says i'm looking for a guy in finance right six five blue eyes or something like that that went viral and then she did a song i believe with david guetta uh you guys have all seen the guy who's drinking cranberry juice and longboarding on a skateboard or whatever it's called a longboard because his car broke down and then everyone started buying cranberry juice and then i believe they bought them a new car or truck, right? What I'm getting at here is these people didn't have a lot of followers, yet they went viral and they got millions of views, if not hundreds of millions of views, and created internet memes and sensations.

9:07Neil Patel:What happens is if you have content and you put it out there, it doesn't matter if you have 10 followers or 100 followers, what the platforms all do is they show it to a small group of people that they think would be interested. If every single one, and I'm giving you an extreme example, watched it, liked it, commented, and shared it, they did all three, then after they showed it to 10 people who did that, they'll start showing it to 500 or 1 ,000. Now you may not get all thousand to that, but if you had 20%, like it, share it, comment on it, and watch it three times, it starts going viral because engagement is high and the platform knows that people love that piece of content.

9:48Neil Patel:So they share it to anyone that they think would be interested. That's how their algorithms typically work. Yep.

9:54Eric Siu:I would also say too, I mean, you've been doing this for a very long time, but when you post something and you want like a YouTube, a new YouTube video, like you'll hit your email list and it does give it a nice initial boost. That goes a long way as well. I stopped doing that. So it's just pure organic now?

10:09Neil Patel:Yeah, so what Eric's talking about is I would publish YouTube videos three times a week. And this was before they introduced shorts. Now I publish YouTube videos daily. Majority are shorts and my longer form are longer than they used to be. And when I used to publish them, I would send an email blast in the first 24 hours. because the way a lot of what YouTube's algorithm works for both the searches, because a lot of YouTube traffic is actually driven not just from people discovering the product in the sidebar or the video in the sidebar, at least for the desktop version. They also discover it by searching on YouTube and then you want to rank.

10:45Neil Patel:If you do well in the first 24 hours, your rankings go up, they recommend you more, and your video tends to blow up. So what I would do is I'll take my email list, the hour that the video got published, and I'll push it out. what ended up happening is is over time as my email list grew YouTube believed that me sending an email blast was spamming and they felt like it was bots or I was trying to game the system right in theory I was you know using the algorithm to my advantage but they thought the traffic was quote-unquote fake and what we saw is they would stop counting the views because they thought it was bot traffic when it was real humans and it would actually hurt it so So I stopped when my email list was smaller.

11:29Neil Patel:It worked well. But when I started blasting out videos to like 2 million people, right? When I published the video. Oh yeah. Yeah. You need to do like segments, dude. Yeah. I never tried it with that. I should go back and try it with a much smaller segment of my list, but I'm too lazy.

11:47Eric Siu:Yeah. Well, I think someone on your team, but probably you're the only one that has control of your email list still, right? No, I don't send out my emails.

11:54Neil Patel:I do review all of the emails so like check this out and I'll let you share this on screen I think this will be interesting for you guys to actually see my workflow but like check this out hope you're doing good this is from Colin this is literally yesterday here's next week's emails and charts for webinars all right I go through every single email and I go and edit them every single week I get one group of emails coming from the consulting side of the business. The other arm of my business is software. I get another group of emails once a week for the next week for all my product-related emails.

12:33Neil Patel:And I literally go through every single one for the subject line, to the copy, to the CTA,

12:39Eric Siu:and I modify every single one.

12:41Neil Patel:But I don't send them out. So yeah, in theory, someone should help you segment

12:46Eric Siu:just for the hell of it, just to test it. Yeah.

12:49Neil Patel:Yeah, you're right. I should do it.

12:51Eric Siu:So there you have it. Guys, hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later.